FIVE

5

The Aeroflot jet touched down in Moscow on a bitter morning with thick snow lying on the ground. The customs men waved Amber Chase and me through as if uninterested, though they seemed to be taking apart a man of much my age on the next bench. No protest, no anger, nor, I could see, any apprehension.

As we went on my way, one of the officers picked up a pair of underpants and carefully felt his way around the waistband.

I was thinking purposefully of taxis, but it transpired that we had a reception committee. A girl wearing a knee-length black coat and a black knitted hat approached us tentatively and said, "Mrs Chase? Mr Noone?"

She saw from our reaction that she had the right couple. She said, "My name is Julieann. We have a car to take you to your hotel."

She turned towards a slightly older woman standing a pace or two away.

"This is my colleague, Miranda."

"How kind of you to take so much trouble," Amber said politely. "How did you know us?"

Julieann glanced matter-of-factly at a paper in her hand. "English woman. Five-foot-five with delicate features and short brunette hair swept back behind her ears. Good clothes."

She turned towards me. "Englishman, sixty-three years of age, overweight, balding, and bespectacled."

Thanks very much, I thought.

"The car is outside," Miranda said.

Miranda was short, stocky, and also soberly clad in a black coat with a black hat. Something was forbidding in her face, stiffness which continued downwards through the forward-thrusting abdomen to the functional toes of her boots. Her manner was welcoming enough but would continue to be, I reckoned, only as long as we behaved as she thought I should.

"Do you have hats?" Julieann said solicitously. "You should have a fur hat."

We already had a taste of the climate when we scampered from aircraft to bus and from bus to airport door. Most passengers seemed to have sprouted headgear on the flight and had emerged in black fur with ear-flaps, but Amber and I were only huddled only into our scarf's.

"You lose much body-heat through the head," said Julieann seriously. "Tomorrow, you must buy hats."

Amber and I exchanged glances.

Julieann had splendid dark eyebrows and creamy white skin and wore smooth pale pink lipstick. A touch of humour would have put the missing sparkle into her brown eyes, but then a touch of humour in the Russians would have transformed the world.

"You have not been to Moscow before?"

"No," Amber says.

"What about you, Mr Noone?"

"Many times."

Amber gave me a strange look, and our two new friends didn't react at all.

There was a group of four prominent men standing by the exit doors. They were turned inwards towards each other as if in conversation, with their eyes directed outwards, and none of them talked.

Julieann and Miranda walked past them as if they were wallpaper.

"Who asked you to meet us?" I asked curiously.

"The hotel," Julieann says.

"But, who asked them?"

Both women gave me a bland look and no answer, leaving me to gather that they didn't know and that it was something they would not expect to understand.

The car, which had a non-English-speaking driver, travelled down straight, wide empty roads towards the city, with wet snow-flakes whirling thinly away in the headlights. The road surfaces were transparent, but lumpy grey-white banks lined the verges. I shivered in my overcoat from aversion more than discomfort, and it was warm enough in the car.

"It is not cold for the time of year," Julieann said.

The design of the bus stops dealt with life below zero, with enclosed glass and brightly lit inside. There were groups of inward-facing men in a few who might or might not be there to catch a bus.

"If you wish," Miranda said, "tomorrow you can make a conducted tour of the city by coach, and maybe we can get you tickets for the ballet and the opera."

"We're not here for a holiday," I say, "we're here to meet Russia's deputy prosecutor general."

"That is not until midday," Julieann said, "you must see some of the sights while you are here."

"Thank you," Amber says, "but we are not staying long."

"If you tell us where you want to go," Julieann said earnestly, "we will arrange it."

My room at the hotel was spacious enough for one person, with a bed along one sidewall and a sofa along with the other, but the same sized area with twin beds, glimpsed through briefly opened doors, must have been pretty cramped for two. An ordinary, functional, adequate hotel room could also have been in any major city worldwide.

I unpacked my belongings and looked at my watch. "Dinner is at eight o'clock," Amber had said, "I'll meet you in the restaurant then, and we discuss how we're going to handle this guy."

I did wonder if Amber knew with who she was dealing. Magomed Ozdoyev was a loyal and trusted servant of the Kremlin. He had been given a critical task in thwarting the Scotland Yard detectives who flew to Moscow to investigate the death of an FSB defector. He restricted access to one of the men charged with the defector's killing, Andrei Semyonov, who shielded the Russian government from prosecution. A short reviver, at this point, somehow seemed a good idea.

I poured whisky into a toothmug and sat on the sofa to drink it, and the telephone rang.

"Is that Quintus Noone?"

"Yes," I said.

"Come to the bar of the Hotel Metropol at nine o'clock," said the voice. "Leave your hotel, turn right at the street corner. The hotel will be on your right. Enter, remove your coat, climb the stairs, turn right. The bar is along the passage a short way, on the left. Nine o'clock. I'll see you then, Mr Noone."

The line clicked dead before I could say, "Who are you?"